15 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $7.2 Billion- Week of September 30, 2024

💰OpenAI is World’s #3 Most Valuable Private Company 💣 Microsoft Wants to Reboot Three Miles Island ️👮“Fake it Till you Make it” isn't an Excuse for the SEC 💰 50% Top US IPOs in Q3 2024 Are Chinese

Oct 07, 2024

Happy Monday from a very hot San Francisco 🥵

Here are a few great things to read & watch this week:

💰OpenAI is Now the World’s #3 Most Valuable Private Company — With a valuation of $157 billion, it is only behind Bytedance and SpaceX. OpenAI is now worth more than Intel and is on par with Uber and Goldman Sachs. In addition to $6.6 billion in equity financing, OpenAI also raised $4 billion in debt. It's hard to imagine $10 billion will give them two years of runway. Want to learn more, here is a quick recap on OpenAI Dev Day 2024.

💰 50% of the Top US IPOs in Q3 2024 Are Chinese Companies - Check out the latest CBinsights’s State of Venture Report - Q3 2024.

🔊 Notebook LLM by Google is Really Cool — Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. This back-and-forth conversation is so natural and sounds so real.

💣 Microsoft Wants to Reboot Three Miles Island’s Nuclear Power Plant — Microsoft is in search of so much clean power that it is willing to reboot Three Mile Island, the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in the US. ChatGPT requires a lot more energy than Google search. Some of these AI data centers are consuming as much electricity as San Francisco. Great podcast by WSJ.

️📜 AI Policy Should be Based in Science, Not Science Fiction — With SB-1047 defeated, a group of scientists (including Ion Stoica and Li Fei‑Fei) is giving a sound plan for taking a scientific approach to studying actual risks and mitigating harm. Key ideas: Let’s empower researchers to study AI risks and increase transparency of AI systems. Read A Path for Science and Evidence‑based AI Policy.

👮 “Fake it Till you Make it” isn't an Excuse for Fraud — SEC alleged that the co-founder of Skael (workplace automation) raised more than $30M from investors by claiming it had as much as $7M in ARR, when that actual figure was no more than $170K. SEC also brought charges against the founders of Medly Health (nurse network) and alleged that three executives defrauded investors and raised over $170M by providing phony financial information. Take a listen.

This week a total of 15 startups raised $7.2B in funding, 1 M&As: